News, Local history and Thanet issues from Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate see www.michaelsbookshop.com I publish over 150 books about the history of this area click here to look at them.

Monday, 22 June 2015

Nosh in The Belgian Café, in the clockworks of the bookshop engineering and science.

Here is the sketch from tonight in Ramsgate’s Belgian Café

This is what happens if you sit in low light drawing towards
the light reflected off The Royal Victora Pavilion, basically you can’t see
what you are trying to draw or what is going onto the paper, if anything
useful.

The food was excellent, ham and cheese salad with everything
fresh and crispy, steak you didn’t need a steak knife for, came to
£22.something or other.

The fish looked good too. But looking at light is a funny old thing.

I bought some clock books for my bookshop in Ramsgate over the weekend, which
when added to what we have in stock, means we have a whole shelf of them,
something of a record, please look at them carefully if you are considering
selling me clock books, as there are clock books and clock books.

I have been called many things over the years, I don’t mean
names here but before I was a shop assistant, engineer, scientist and even
occasionally mechanic.

I worked for a while at the optical bench, which did have
something to do with the clockmakers bench and the quantum mechanics toolbox.

Back in the early confused period accurate clocks when used
with telescopes had as much to do with where you were as when you were.

This is to do with knowing the precise time, which can be
determined by observing the rotation of the moons around planets through an optical telescope, this looks
the same where ever on earth you are. So a moon that appears on the surface of
a planet does so at the same time in Greenwich as in the newly discovered
Americas, allowing you to set your clock accurately enough to determine the
height of the sun at noon, which after a few sums tells you exactly where the
newly discover Americas are.

This playing with clocks and light has lead to all sort of
things, because looking at the way light behaves, which is a wavicle that can
be waves or particles – depending on how you observe this light – gave us
enough understanding of how electricity - could behave to invent the transistors
that make your computer compute.

Back in the swinging 60s bashing away at the optical bench
we found that we could produce holograms, which are a sort of three dimensional
TV, (oddly enough some peole could see them in colour and some only in monochrome) there has been a delay in this appearing in your living room, partly
because it uses lasers and the spies and the warriors became very interested in
lasers and partly because inventions take ages to get into production.

Quite recently some scientists playing with the sound that
you can’t hear that comes from the sensors that help park your car, discovered
this can be focused into something you can feel, and I guess the chemists will
find something in the air that will temporarily solidify, so don’t be surprised
if we soon have a holodeck on starship earth.

But what about these wavicles and why can’t we look at them
properly. First we need an orange on the football pitch analogy because they
are small and there are lots of them, well the football pitch isn’t big enough
for this one.

How far is the furthest star you can see with the naked
eyeball? About sixteen thousand light years away (V762 Cas, in Cassiopeia at
16,308 light-years away) and you can still see it if you shut one eye, so
different wavicles are arriving at each eye.

As the wavicles are travelling at the speed of light, time,
our time and maybe any time, isn’t happening for them, so if you do something to
it/them, it was always done for the about sixteen thousand years, since an electron changed its energy level on Cas and made light.

The only thing we know we can do to light is polarise it, so
if you were standing on Cas about sixteen thousand light years ago exciting the
electrons that were reaching my eyes now, and you had the equipment to see
which way the light was polarised, if I kept taking off and putting on
polarised sunglasses in morse code, I could communicate with you back through
time.

Anyway we are now entering the age of the quantum computer,
which allows for computers circuits to have three states instead of two, 1, 0
and peppermint sorry wosisname, not random but uncertain.

I think I had better stop this, reality, especially the bit
that isn’t experiencing time may be fragile and anyway I have been, wots the
word – processing – nah not in a secondhand bookshop wosisnameing Enid Blyton
books today.

But seriously looking at something that is baby baby out of
time and expecting it to look like something…

4 comments:

Another thing in a Different time dimension Don, my parents disapproved of Enid Blyton, Beano and the like, although for some inexplicable reason Rupert was OK. My grandfather, a veteran of the trenches and so cunning, used to smuggle them in and we would read them together. I would smuggle one in for you if I knew how.

Ah that one Dave, when I started using computers in 1968 the rumour was that it was still trying to calculate the square root of its third state, so it could get started on the sums.

I think the a possibility with quantum computing is that it will be a bit like debating with mother in law, inasmuch as once the state of uncertainty has reached the state of certainty, it will have always been.

My guess is that a big problem will be associated with coils of fibre optics allowing the computer to talk to itself last Thursday and all the post docs winning the lottery, giving up their disruptive love affairs and going off to lie in the sun drinking beer.

Please note comments that may be libellous, comments that may be construed as offensive, anonymous derogatory comments about real people, comments baiting internet trolls, comments saying that an anonymous comment was made by a named real person, boring comments and spam comments, comments in CAPs will be deleted. Playground stuff like calling real people by their time stamp or surname alone, referring to groups as gangs, old duffers and so on will result in deletion. Comment that may be construed as offensive to minority groups is not allowed here either, so think before you write it, remember that the internet is a public place, that it is very difficult to be truly anonymous and that everyone who uses it leaves a trail of some sort. Also note the facility to leave anonymous comment will be turned of during periods when I am unable to monitor comment, this will not affect people commenting who are signed on to their blogger accounts. When things are particularly difficult on the commercial spam front I may turn comment moderation on for periods.

If you feel that someone has left a comment that is offensive and directed at you personally please email me (link on the sidebar) asking to have it removed, you will need to tell which post and the date and timestamp of the offending comment. Please do not reply to the offending comment as I will assume you continuing the dialogue as meaning that you want the comments left there.

Something that I don't understand is why Margate Lifeboat can't have some sort of launching jetty like it used to have. I kno...

recent comments

Local history facilities.

Much of the local history I publish is available for free on this blog, in some cases I have linked whole books to blog postings, if you want a printed copy of one of the books I publish click here postage is free to UK addresses.

Alternatively you can of course come to my bookshop in Ramsgate and browse them and about 30,000 secondhand books on other subjects, remember we close Thursdays and Sundays.